Cruel Angel's Thesis
by J2
Summary: Mostly Piccolo's point of view about Gohan's SSJ2 transformation. Bittersweet.


Contains a spoiler if you haven't seen all the Cell Saga episodes. Feedback is appreciated. ^_^   
  
  
Like an angel that has no sense of mercy  
Rise young boy to the heavens like a legend...  
The cruel angel's thesis bleeds through a portal  
like your pulsing blood  
--Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Cruel Angel's Thesis"--   
  
Part I. Transformation  
  
  
The energy of the two warriors has completely scorched the surrounding earth for miles, reducing what was once teeming with vegetation and life into little more than a barren wasteland. Stunned by the horror of what he has just witnessed, a young boy stands motionless in the center of the destruction, his pale, white face a sharp contrast to the bright red blood that streams from his cuts and the stiff waves of blazing yellow locks that fall haphazardly into his eyes. A taller figure towers nearby, his light blue visage twisted with a cold, calculating glee as he measures the desired effectiveness of his savage action by analyzing the shock playing across the young boy's face.   
  
Yet for the child, the battlefield fades into a dim background--the shouts and gasps of his friends as their energy continues to ebb away, the taunts of the savage, relentless beast before him, the throbbing pain, the haunting fear that he can never be the fighter his father believed him to be--all pales into insignificance as the young boy stares at the lifeless head of the android before him. The last whispered words of the android--"Please protect the nature I love"--play over and over like a broken record in the child's memory. The vision of a bird, soaring gently upon golden wings, passes before his horror-frozen blue eyes; symbolic of nature, and perhaps life itself, an ephemeral breath suspended on wings of gold. Life that *he* would destroy. Just because he could.   
  
The child warrior clenches his bloodied fists, and an unearthly scream of pure rage tears the heavens apart.  
  
  
  
Part II. Reflections of a Sensei  
  
"If you want to feel resentment, curse your own fate...as do I." Piccolo to Gohan, pre-Saiya-jin arrival.  
  
  
  
I'd always told him he was too soft and too trusting. I warned him that this weakness would get him killed, just like it had his gullible air-headed father, Son Goku. I tried to make the kid hard by awakening the Saiyan nature that I believed surely lay dormant beneath the surface. It was our only chance to save Chikyuu from the Saiya-jin invaders---so I could conquer it later, of course. That was the only reason I would deign to train the child of Son, my sworn enemy from the exact moment of my bitter conception.  
  
A few months abandoned in the harsh wilderness ought to do it, I decided; it certainly had for me. It would strip away the dainty customs and affectedness that the weak human civilization bred. That is, if he managed to live.   
  
He did, although I was forced to pull a few late night brat-watching shifts for the first few weeks. For someone so small, he was quite a troublesome, noisy runt: always falling off cliffs, getting chased by dinosaurs, whining about scraped knees, transforming into a bone-crushing killer monkey under the full moon... Over time, though, his survivalist instincts finally kicked in and he didn't need to be coddled anymore. After he built that boat and journeyed the entire distance to his home I knew that he had toughened up enough to actually survive a sparring session. For the next six months, I sparred from sunrise to sunset with the runt until he was too sore to even lift his scrawny arms up to block, and his little muscles trembled with exhaustion. Since he was only four, and a pampered four at that, sometimes tears would escape from his dark eyes when he got hurt; still, he would always scramble back up to his legs after I knocked him down, albeit with much sniffling and high-pitched carrying-on.   
  
Eventually, however, fewer of my blows connected as his innate skill and strength increased. I had been expecting as much from the son of Goku, but still I felt a mixture of surprise and some other alien emotion the first time he hit me hard enough to draw blood.  
  
Yet his reaction was not one of pride; instead, he had stared at the blood on my cheek as if in horror of his latent strength. That should have been the first indication, a red flag to me, that the child was not a fighter at heart like Son, despite the Saiya-jin blood coursing through his veins. But I brushed the niggling feeling aside in order to concentrate on the upcoming battle. It's just because he's young, I reassured myself.  
  
As the years passed, however, he never grew to enjoy fighting, to his father's unexpressed yet evident puzzlement. Son could never understand why his child preferred literature over fighting, calculus instead of sparring--for all his own purported high-minded ideals about protecting life and stopping evil, the real reason he fought was his sheer love of it-the thrill of pitting himself against a worthy opponent, the sudden rush of adrenaline that courses through the body as you stare into his eyes, realizing that for a few brief moments on the battlefield, nothing will exist except you and he--  
  
Vegeta, well, I suppose he fought for his Saiya-jin pride, whatever the hell that's supposed to be. Regardless, perhaps that's all he had or has left to cling to, after the destruction of Vegeta-sei. Being prince of a kingdom where your subjects equal a grand total of one probably has a way of dealing a severe blow to an already over-inflated ego.   
  
But my student fought for neither. He fought only because a cold and unfeeling fate placed the warrior's burden upon his young shoulders; it was a matter of life or death for those he loved. Looking back, I realize he would have been content to retire to the quiet life of a scholar with his books, with perhaps an occasional, non-violent adventure.   
  
For all his warrior's prowess, though, Son could never understand this side of his son. Today, when he announced that his child would be the one to defeat Cell, I was certain Goku had surely gotten whatever little common sense he possessed knocked out of his thick skull in the battle. To place his only child before a monster like Cell, like some kind of sacrificial offering... Cell believed Goku, though, as one warrior to another. He shifted his sick attentions onto the boy, playing with his emotions like a cat his cornered prey, in order to expose the powers that lay dormant beneath the surface. But when that failed, the monster turned his focus upon us, assaulting us with his Cell Juniors, but still the child was unable to release his anger, helpless before the onslaught.   
  
But then Cell coldly crushed Jurokugo's head beneath his feet, and something cracked in the child of Son. When his scream of blinding rage shattered the heavens, it seemed as if there was no place for his gentle soul within a heart full of burning anger, and it had been shredded to pieces, consumed in overwhelming passion. As his ki literally exploded around him, I realized he wasn't himself anymore, not the child that I had trained, that had wheedled his way into the heart I thought didn't exist, that I'd come to view as my own son... he was something monstrous, utterly savage and cruel, with no pity at all.   
  
It should have never happened. Cell, or perhaps I should say fate, kept pushing and pushing until he was trapped against a wall, and forced to use a power he never wanted anyway.   
  
The battle ended in a victory for Chikyuu with Cell's eventual destruction, but a hollow one at best. Son is dead again, this time for eternity, and his son blames himself for it. He is left having to live with the bitter realization that he is the most powerful being in the universe, but his full power transforms him into the very kind of monster that he has sworn to protect the earth from.   
  
I can feel his sensitive soul bleeding through the bond we share. I want to comfort him, to tell him it's not his fault, that I should have been strong enough/wise enough to stop Cell myself, but I don't think my empty words would change anything. Besides, I'm the one who forced him to become a fighter in the first place.  
  
So I sit here on a lonely perch overlooking the miles of ruined earth in the middle of nowhere, listening to the wind plaintively whistle through the blackened tree stumps as it rustles my tattered cape. Just a fallen half-kami who's failed in his duty to protect his planet, or even protect the one person who taught me to love.  
  
--I'm sorry, Gohan--  



End file.
